The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has initiated the Long Term Evolution (LTE) program to bring new technology, new network architecture, new configurations and new applications and services to wireless networks in order to provide improved spectral efficiency and faster user experiences. In an LTE compliant network, a wireless transmit receive unit (WTRU) may receive system information updates. Included in the system information updates may be the size and location of a Physical HARQ Indicator Channel (PHICH).
A WTRU may receive updated system information on a Primary Broadcast Channel (P-BCH) or Dynamic-BCH (D-BCH). Resource allocation for system information updates may be fixed or variable, but variable resource allocation is preferred for signaling efficiency.
Variable resource allocation, however, suffers from a disadvantage. A WTRU may experience excessive latency when waking from Discontinuous Reception (DRX) cycle and excessive overhead may be required to signal system update information. A WTRU may need to wait as long as 80 ms before it receives an entire D-BCH message. Latency becomes an issue if the eNodeB (eNB) is permitted to change system information every D-BCH cycle.
If a WTRU wakes up from DRX exactly at the D-BCH boundary, it has to wait at least 80 ms for D-BCH to be completely received before it can decode and retrieve the system information update. During this interval, the WTRU does not know if the system information has changed since its last uplink (UL) transmission. If the WTRU wakes up in the middle of the D-BCH cycle, then it cannot decode the D-BCH in its current cycle. The result may be as much as a 150 ms delay, which is not acceptable for time sensitive applications such as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). Similar latency is experienced when system information updates are transmitted on the P-BCH, with a potential latency of 70 ms.
Therefore, there exists a need for an improved method and apparatus for signaling system information updates.